Group F Week 8 Pottery Data

The week 8 lab was a two-day lab event that involved the firing of basic pots in a two stage camp fire and then another day for the fire to be smothered. This experiment was conducted as a joint operation with group E and our data should therefore be near identical.

On the first day we built a small campfire and began warming the pots from outside the fire. The pots were slowly moved closer to the center of the fire in order to raise their temperature slowly. This was to try to minimize any heat shock for when they would be placed in an actual fire.

Initial Data

Heating Timeline

Pot #	Initial Temp (°C)	+10 min	+10 min	+10 min	+10 min *	+10 min	+10 min	+10 min
1	30-33	43.5	60.9	62.5	–	812	763	655
2	30-33	57.4	62.3	63.8	–	813	700
3	30-33	41.3	61.8	77.3	223	905	689
4	30-33	45.0	62.8	69.8	–	–	805

Some observations about the heating timeline:

Our initial fire was smaller than all others group’s fire and therefore the pots probably did not reach an appropriate temperature before stacking them in the second fire. However, I believe that we were the only station to not have any pots break before the second fire stage.

Results From the Firing.

Standard Clay	Height (inch)	Top Diameter (inch)	Bottom Diameter (inch)	Wall Thickness (Inch)	Weight (g)
Pot 1*	2.75	3.75	3.0	0.25	182
Pot 2*	2.75	2.25	3.5	1.0	210
Arb Clay
Pot 3	1.5	2.0	1.0	0.5	73
Pot 4	1.25	3.0	2.75	0.5	139

Pot Condition After Firing

Pot #	Color	Condition
1	Black/Grey	Flake from bottom broke off but vessel not critically compromised, cracked lip
2	Light Grey	Large bottom and side flakes missing but vessel not critically compromised
3	Red/brown with some black	No damage
4	Red/brown with some black	No damage

Some observations from pot results:

We only thoroughly observed four pots to follow through the entire process, but we had over 10 pots in our fire. We only had one pot that was unrecoverable, but all other pots were at least partially intact. Out of all the pots the Arb clay pots had significantly better results than the standard clay pots. Also, I was not the one who did the measurement for the pre- and post-firing but to me there seems to be about a +/-0.25 inch error. This could have been eliminated if the measurements were preformed with metric units instead.

Smothering Technique

We were assigned hay/straw as our smothering material. We utilized an entire bale of wet straw, but we were unable to fully smother the fire. When we returned the straw had been consumed by the fire. This is probably why we did not achieve the dark black color other groups achieved.